Image Feature Matching Based on Spatial Constraints and Inertial Assistance for AGV Navigation in Digital Workshops

VSLAM shows promising potential for AGV navigation in digital workshops, thanks to its merits in low cost, easy configuration, high flexibility, and high accuracy. However, the AGV visual perception system could be easily affected by lighting changes, and body abrupt motions. The state-of-the-art visual feature matching methods may fail to fulfill the navigation tasks in presence of these challenging issues. In order to solve these problems, we propose a feature matching method based on feature space constraints and inertial assistance. In order to reduce the computational time, the spatial constraints are designed to delete the obvious false matches. Besides, the Inertia Assistance Visual Sample Consensus (IAVSAC) is proposed to reduce the computational time in discriminating the wrong feature matches. In order to ensure the reliability of the inertial data, the analysis of IMU noise has been performed. The best IMU configuration with the smallest noises is designed. Our proposed method has been evaluated on the developed AGV navigation platform. The results show that the feature matching accuracy rate and computational time of ours are more favorable than those of RANSAC and MSAC.